mendation, his collected works form only a little thick octavo volume, containing four plays and some miscellaneous poems, prefaced by fifty-six copies of commendatory verses from his friends and fellow-collegians. These pieces, though not without merit, will certainly not sustain the contemporary eulogium appended to them. It must be remembered, however, that they were written while Cartwright's various excellencies were yet green in the memory of his contemporaries. Cartwright was also the author of some Greek and Latin poems, and a Passion sermon. His career was suddenly closed in 1643, by a malignant fever, which the war had introduced into Oxford. King Charles, who was at Oxford when Cartwright died, wore black on the day of his funeral, and the regret for him was general.'

Robert Burton.

BORN A. D. 1576.-died a. d. 1639.

We must distinguish betwixt this name as belonging to the author of one of the most curious and celebrated works in the English language, the Anatomy of Melancholy,' and as employed by a bookseller in the 17th century on the title-page of a numerous set of popular volumes. The honest bibliopole who modestly conjectured that his own name was less likely to attract the public attention than the one he adopted on his title-pages, was one Nathaniel Crouch, or Nat Crouch as he is familiarly designated in the Bodleian catalogue; and he continued writing, or rather compiling and abridging his Twelve-penny books' for upwards of fifty years. His title-pages were a little swelling,' but they took well, and his books were long in high request among the chapmen and travelling booksellers.?

The true Robert Burton was the younger brother of William Burton, the author of the well-known History of Leicestershire,' and was born at Lindley in Leicestershire, his father's estate, on the 8th of February 1576. His early education was conducted at Sutton-Colfield; and in 1593 he was admitted of Brazen-nose college. He took the degree of B.D. in 1614; and in 1616 was presented to the vicarage of St Thomas in Oxford. He held also the rectory of Segrave in his native county. His death took place on the 25th of January 1639-40. His monument in Christ church bears the following inscription from his own pen: Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia.

Burton appears to have been a man of very peculiar humours, but an accomplished and diligent scholar. His reading was immense, and his memory enabled him to keep ready for use almost every thing he had ever read. His Anatomy of Melancholy' is a singularly compiled treatise on a singular subject. It is much pleasanter reading, however, than its title promises; its author was, in fact, except during those seasons when his morbid mind asserted its supremacy, a very companionable and facetious fellow, and his language is free from the vitiated

Biog. Brit.-Retrospective Review, vol. x.
Gough's Topography.-Dunton's Life.

mannerism of many of his contemporaries. It was highly popular when it first appeared, but had fallen into neglect when some incidental notices of it by a no less distinguished critic than Dr Johnson again brought it into fashion. Dr Ferrier of Manchester, in his Illustrations of Sterne,' has ingeniously traced the obligations of that sentimental writer to the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy.'

William and Henry Lawes.

FLOR. A. D. 1640.

ENGLISH music is under deep obligations to these two early composers. They were the sons of Thomas Lawes, a vicar-choral in Salisbury church, and both the disciples of Coperario. Henry died in 1662; William, in 1645.

It was the honour and happiness of Henry Lawes to be on terms of intimate friendship both with Waller and with Milton. The former gave him his songs to set to music; the latter wrote his exquisite masque of Comus' at his solicitation, it is said, and married Lawes' music to his own immortal verse. Both poets seem to have been fully satisfied with their colleague's part of the performance. Waller celebrates the musical skill of Henry Lawes in one of his poems; and Milton has not disdained to address one of his sonnets to Harry of tuneful and well-measured song.' Fenton, in one of his notes on Waller, says, that the best poets of the age were ambitious of having their songs set by this artist, whose style was better fitted for song-music than that of any of his contemporaries. Henry Lawes composed tunes to George Sandys' Paraphrases on the Psalms,' published in 1638. The music to Comus was unfortunately never printed, and nothing remains of it to tell in what manner the artist found fitting musical expression and harmony for the delicious and varied numbers of that unmatched poem.

William Lawes was in high favour with Charles I. His chief compositions were fantasies for viols, and songs and symphonies for masques. His anthem for four voices in Dr Boyce's second volume, is reckoned his masterpiece; but Burney and Hawkins agree in regarding his compositions as irregular and not always correct in harmony. William Lawes appears to have composed a good deal in conjunction with his brother Henry.

Richard Crashaw.

DIED A. D. 1650.

RICHARD CRASHAW united in himself the learning of an accom plished scholar and the imaginative fervour of a pious poet; admired and warmly eulogised by Cowley, his writings were a fountain from the waters of which Pope and Roscommon did not disdain to draw. Still his poems are but little known, nor can it be said that the neglect into which they have fallen is altogether unmerited; though scattered with flowers of exquisite beauty, which Pope thought worth transplant

ing, the inappropriate expressions, figures, and similes which abound, and the occasional vulgar and ludicrous familiarity of language, are so offensive to the reader as nearly to destroy the pleasure derived from his beauties. He is said to have been born in London, and to have been a foundation boy in the Charter-house school, under a very excellent master of the name of Brooks. The Oxford antiquary states that he was the son of an eminent divine, and that he became a student of Pembroke-hall, and a fellow of Peter-house, in Cambridge, where, in 1637, he was distinguished for his poetical talents. In 1644, when the parliamentary army expelled those members of the university who refused to take the covenant, Crashaw, unable to contemplate with resignation or indifference the ruin of the church establishment, went over to France, where his sufferings, by their effect on his peculiarly constructed mind, prepared him to embrace Romanism. Those who have attributed the conversion of Crashaw to motives of interest, must have been utterly unacquainted with the extreme tenderness and enthusiasm of his character. So far from being impelled by worldly motives, he seems rather to have been converted by his passionate admiration of that fair canonized enthusiast, St Teresa of Spain. Her pious compositions appear to have been his favourite study; and the reader who peruses the following address to her, whatever he may think concerning the tender bigotry of the poet, will hardly suspect that his piety was not perfectly sincere.

"O thou undaunted daughter of desires,

By all thy dower of lights and fires;

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;

By all thy lives and deaths of love;

By thy large draughts of intellectual day,

And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;

By all thy brim-fill'd bowls of fierce desire;

By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;

By the full kingdom of that final kiss,

That seal'd thy parting soul, and made thee His;

By all the heavens thou hast in Him;

Fair sister of the seraphim;

By all of Him we have in thee,—
Leave nothing of myself in me;

Let me so read thy life that I

Unto all life of mine may die."

But were this supposition incorrect, the arts of the controversialists of that religion, together with the ardent and tender disposition of the man, render it highly unreasonable to impute his conversion to any other motives than sincere conviction. He was indeed formed to sympathise in all the rapturous and seraphic ardours which have distinguished the devotees of the Roman communion, especially those of the female sex, and these lines to St Teresa breathe a spirit of pious enthusiasm which could only be inspired by kindred feelings. That he was no immediate gainer in point of interest by the change appears by the distressed circumstances in which he was found, in 1646, by his warm admirer, and probably academical friend, Cowley. By his brother-poet he was recommended to the notice of the fugitive queen of Charles the First, Henrietta Maria, who, not having the power to do much for him herself, gave him introductory letters to her friendo

in Italy. Through their means he was first entertained as secretary to a cardinal at Rome, and afterwards appointed to a canonry in the church of Loretto, where, soon after his induction, he died of a fever, about the year 1650.

Crashaw's poems were published under the titles of Steps to the Temple,' The Delights of the Muses,' and 'Carmen Deo Nostro, Sacred poems presented to the Countess of Denbigh.' His original pieces are chiefly devoted to religious topics. His translations, as poetry, are considered far superior to his original compositions. Of the translations, that which is deemed the best is a portion of Marino's poem, entitled, Strage degli Innocenti,' of which Crashaw unhappily translated but one book out of four. He wrote several epigrams, one of which we shall insert, because it contains a celebrated line, the credit of which is frequently not attributed to its real author.

JOAN. 2.

Aquæ in vinum versæ.

"Unde rubor vestris et non sua purpura lymphis;
Quæ rosa mirantes tam nova mutat aquas ?
Numen (convivæ), præsens agnoscite numen!
Nympha pudica deum vidit et erubuit."

which may be thus translated,

"Whence the crystal's strange impurpled dye ?
Why with new and rosy redness flushed?
Remember, friends, the Deity was by;

The conscious water saw its God, and blushed."

John Bastwick.

BORN A.D. 1593.-DIED CIR. A. D. 1650.

JOHN BASTWICK, an English physician of the 17th century, has attained considerable notoriety by his tractates against the bishops, and other polemical writings. He was born at Writtle in Essex, in 1593, and must have inherited a decent property, as he was educated in Emanuel college, Cambridge, whence he repaired to the university of Padua for the purpose of studying medicine. In that celebrated school he took his degree, and, returning to his native country, established himself at Colchester, where he practised with success as a physician, but was diverted from his proper province by his desire of healing the disorders which, in his opinion, afflicted the church, and which he attributed to the extravagant assumptions of the bishops, whose claims he examined in a Latin treatise, entitled, Apologeticus ad Præsules Anglicanos in Curiâ Celsæ Commissionis.' In this work he attempted to prove that the authority of bishops was not derived from Divine right. Though he seems to have exempted from his animadversions those prelates who might profess to derive their power, spiritual and temporal, from the civil institutions of their country, his work was regarded as a most flagitious affair, and, at the instigation of Laud, he was arrested and brought be

fore the court of high commission. Here he pleaded that his book was only written against the pope and the Italian bishops, and those who claimed authority over all kings, princes, and ecclesiastics, jure divino; but notwithstanding of this ingenious endeavour to extricate himself from his dilemma, the 'Apologeticus' was declared a scandalous libel, and its author condemned to pay a fine of £1000, besides costs, and to be imprisoned in the gate-house till he should recant his errors. Bastwick now addressed himself with dogged resolution to the task of censuring the English prelates, and published his Litany for the special use of our English prelates,' in 1637. For this new offence Laud caused an information to be exhibited against him in the star-chamber. This instrument was filed in that court on the 11th day of March, 1637. At the same time, proceedings of a similar nature were taken against the celebrated William Prynne, for his 'Histrio-Mastix,' and against the Rev. Dr Burton, for preaching and publishing two seditious sermons: which were carried on pari passu, with those against Bastwick.

Bastwick's defence proved a gross aggravation of his original offence. In it he professed to demonstrate that the prelates were invaders of the king's prerogative royal, contemners and despisers of holy scripture, advancers of popery, superstition, idolatry, and profaneness. It was of enormous length, occupying five skins and a half of parchment closely written; and, in print, twenty-nine goodly pages in quarto in the smallest type. The result was, that he was condemned with the other two defendants to lose his ears, to pay a fine of £5000, and to perpetual imprisonment. He endured his corporal punishment with great fortitude, and on his way back to the Tower, amused himself with composing the following punning distich :

"S. L. STIGMATA LAUDIS.

Stigmata maxillis referens insignia Laudis
Exultans remeo, victima grata Deo."

From the Tower he was removed to Launceston castle, Cornwall, and thence to St Mary's castle in the Isle of Scilly, where he was not even permitted to see his relations. On the ascendancy of the parliament in 1640, the sentences of all these persons were reversed, and declared illegal; and the judges who passed them were ordered to make a reparation to the amount of the fines which they had inflicted on Prynne and his associates, but the confusion of the times prevented the payment of the money. Bastwick was also ordered to be restored to his place in the college of Physicians On their approach to London, multitudes of the citizens, carrying green boughs and flowers, met them some miles from the city, and they were received with the loudest acclarnations of joy. Bastwick was alive in 1648, and wrote two pamphlets against the Independents, and a defence of himself against Lilburn. When and where he died is uncertain. His picture is prefixed to the Flagellum Pontificis,' published in 1633 in Holland.'